Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Nimmo Gorakhpuri came over one weekend with a (literally) blow-by-blow fourth-person account of how the relative of a neighbor’s friend had been beaten to death in front of his family by a mob that accused him of killing a cow and eating beef.

“You had better chase out these old cows that you have here,” she said. “If they die here — not if, when they die — they’ll say you killed them and that will be the end of all of you. They must have their eyes on this property now. That’s how they do it these days. They accuse you of eating beef and then take over your house and your land and send you to a refugee camp. It’s all about property, not cows. You have to be very careful.”

“Careful in what way?” Saddam shouted. “The only way you can be careful with these bastards is by ceasing to exist! If they want to kill you they will kill you whether you are careful or not, whether you’ve killed a cow or not, whether you have even set eyes on a cow or not.” It was the first time anybody had ever heard him lose his temper. Everybody was taken aback. None of them knew his story. Anjum had told nobody. As a keeper of secrets, she was nothing short of Olympic class.

On Independence Day, in what had grown to be a ritual, Saddam sat next to Anjum on the red car sofa with his sunglasses on. He switched channels between Gujarat ka Lalla’s bellicose speech at the Red Fort and a massive, public protest in Gujarat. Thousands of people, mainly Dalit, had gathered in a district called Una to protest the public flogging of five Dalits who had been stopped on the road because they had the carcass of a cow in their pickup truck. They hadn’t killed the cow. They had only picked up the carcass like Saddam’s father had, all those years ago. Unable to bear the humiliation of what was done to them, all five men had tried to commit suicide. One had succeeded.

“First they tried to finish off the Muslims and Christians. Now they’re going for the Chamars,” Anjum said.

“It’s the other way around,” Saddam said. He did not explain what he meant, but looked thrilled as speaker after speaker at the protest swore on oath that they would never again pick up cow carcasses for upper-caste Hindus.

What didn’t make it to TV were the gangs of thugs that had positioned themselves on the highways leading away from the venue of the gathering, waiting to pick off the protesters as they dispersed.

Anjum and Saddam’s Independence Day TV-watching ritual was interrupted by wild shrieks from Zainab, who was outside, hanging up some washing. Saddam raced out, followed by a slower, worried Anjum. It took them a while to believe that what they saw was real and not a specter. Zainab, her gaze directed skyward, was transfixed, terrified.

A crow hung frozen in mid-air, one of its wings spread out like a fan. A feathered Christ, hanging askew, on an invisible cross. The sky swarmed with thousands of agitated, low-flying fellow crows, their distraught cawing drowning out every other city sound. Above them in an upper tier, silent kites circled, curious perhaps, but inscrutable. The crucified crow was absolutely still. Very quickly a small crowd of people gathered to watch the proceedings, to frighten themselves to death, to advise each other about the occult significance of frozen crows, and to discuss the exact nature of the horrors that this ill-omen, this macabre curse, would visit upon them.

What had happened was not a mystery. The crow’s wing feathers had snagged mid-flight on an invisible kite string that was laced across the branches of the old Banyan trees in the graveyard. The felon — a purple paper-kite — peeped guiltily through the foliage of one of them. The string, a new Chinese brand that had suddenly flooded the market, was made of tough, transparent plastic, coated with ground glass. Independence Day kite-warriors used it to “cut” each other’s strings, and bring each other’s kites down. It had already caused some tragic accidents in the city.

The crow had struggled at first, but seemed to have realized that each time it moved, the string sliced deeper into its wing. So it stayed still, looking down with a bewildered, bright eye in its tilted head at the people gathered below. With every passing moment the sky grew denser with more and more distressed, hysterical crows.

Saddam, who had hurried away after assessing the situation, returned with a long rope made of several odd pieces of parcel string and clothes line knotted together. He tied a stone to one end and, squinting into the sun through his sunglasses, lobbed the stone into the sky, using instinct to gauge the trajectory of the invisible kite-string, hoping to loop the rope over it and bring it down with the weight of the stone. It took several attempts and several changes of stone (it had to be light enough to spin high into the sky, and heavy enough to arc over the string and pull it through the foliage it was snagged on) before he succeeded. When he finally did, the kite-string fell to the ground. The crow first dipped down with it, and then, magically, flew away. The sky lightened, the cawing receded.

Normalcy was declared.

To those onlookers in the graveyard who were of an irrational and unscientific temper (which means all of them, including Ustaniji), it was clear that an apocalypse had been averted and a benediction earned in its place.

The Man of the Moment was feted, hugged and kissed.

Not one to allow such an opportunity to pass, Saddam decided that his Time was Now.

Late that night he went to Anjum’s room. She was lying on her side, propped up on an elbow, looking tenderly down at Miss Jebeen the Second, who was fast asleep. (The unsuitable-bedtime-stories stage was still to come.)

“Imagine,” she said, “but for the grace of God, this little creature would have been in some government orphanage right now.”

Saddam allowed for a well-judged moment of respectful silence and then formally asked her for Zainab’s hand in marriage. Anjum responded a little bitterly, without looking up, suddenly revisited by an old ache.

“Why ask me? Ask Saeeda. She’s her mother.”

“I know the story. That’s why I’m asking you.”

Anjum was pleased, but did not show it. Instead she looked Saddam up and down as though he was a stranger.

“Give me one reason why Zainab should marry a man who is waiting to commit a crime and then be hanged like Saddam Hussein of Iraq?”

“ Arre yaar , that’s all over now. It’s gone. My people have risen up.” Saddam took out his mobile phone and pulled up the Saddam Hussein execution video. “Here, see. I’m deleting it now, right in front of you. See, it’s gone. I don’t need it any more. I have a new one now. Look.”

As she cranked herself up on her bed and creaked into a sitting position, Anjum grumbled good-naturedly under her breath, “ Ya Allah! What sin have I committed that I have to put up with this lunatic?” She put on her reading glasses.

The new video Saddam showed her began with a shot of several rusty pickup trucks parked in the compound of a genteel old colonial bungalow — the office of a local District Collector in Gujarat. The trucks were piled high with old carcasses and skeletons of cows. Furious young Dalit men unloaded the carcasses and began flinging them into the deep, colonnaded verandah of the bungalow. They left a macabre trail of cow skeletons in the driveway, placed a huge, horned skull on the Collector’s office table and draped serpentine cow vertebrae like antimacassars over the backs of his pretty armchairs.

Anjum watched the video looking shocked, the light from the mobile phone screen bouncing off her perfect white tooth. It was clear the men were shouting, but the volume on the phone was turned down so as not to wake Miss Jebeen.